Complete Works of E W Hornung

by E. W. Hornung

  Sir Joseph had lowered his elephantine form into a chair beside the tea-table, where he sat, with his great cane between his enormous legs, munching cake like a school-boy and winking at his friends. He winked at Claude. The magistrate had been a journalist, and a scandalous Bohemian, so he said, in his young days; he had given Claude introductions and advice when the latter took to his pen. He, also, inquired after the new book, but rather grimly, and expressed himself with the rough edge of his tongue on the subject of modern “poets” and “poetry”: the inverted commas were in his voice.

  “You young spring poets,” said he, “are too tender by half; you’re all white meat together. You may say that’s no reason why I should have my knife in you. Why didn’t you say it? A bad joke would be a positive treat from you precious young fellows of to-day. And you give us bad lyrics instead, in limited editions; that’s the way it takes you now.”

  Claude laughed; he was absurdly good-humoured under hostile criticism, a quality of which some of his literary friends were apt to take advantage. On this occasion, however, his unconcern was partly due to inattention. While listening to his old friend he was thinking still of the Duke.

  “I’m sorry you would be a poet, Claude,” the magistrate continued. “The price of poets has gone down since my day. And you’d have done so much better in the House — by which, of course, I mean the House we all thought you were bound for. Has he — has he turned up yet?”

  “Oh yes; he’s in England,” replied Claude, with discretion.

  Sir Joseph pricked his ears, but curbed his tongue. Of all the questions that gathered on his lips, only one was admissible, even in so old a friend as himself.

  “A family man?”

  “No; a bachelor.”

  “Capital! We shall see some fun, eh?” chuckled Sir Joseph, gobbling the last of his last slice. “What a quarry — what a prize! I was reminded of him only this morning, Claude. I had an Australian up before me — a most astounding fellow! An escaped bush-ranger, I should call him; looked as if he’d been cut straight out of a penny dreadful; never saw such a man in my life. However — —”

  Claude was not listening; his preoccupation was this time palpable. The mouth of him was open, and his eyes were fixed; the police magistrate followed their lead, with double eye-glasses in thick gold frames; and then his mouth opened too.

  Her guests were making way for Lady Caroline Sellwood, who was leading towards the tea-table, by his horny hand, none other than the ninth Duke of St. Osmund’s himself. Her Ladyship’s face was radiant with smiles; yet the Duke was just as he had been the day before, as unkempt, as undressed (his Crimean shirt had a flannel collar, but no tie), as round-shouldered; with his nose and ears still flayed by the sun; and the notorious wideawake tucked under his arm.

  “He has come straight from the bush,” her Ladyship informed everybody (as though she meant some shrub in the Square garden), “and just as he is. I call it so sweet of him! You know you’ll never look so picturesque again, my dear Duke!”

  Olivia followed with the best expression her frank face could muster. Claude took his cousin’s hand in a sudden hush.

  “Where in the world have you been?” broke from him before them all.

  “Been? I’ve been run in,” replied the Duke, with a smack of his bearded grinning lips.

  “Tea or coffee, Duke?” said Lady Caroline, all smiling tolerance. “Tea? A cup of tea for the Duke of St. Osmund’s. And where do you say you have been?”

  “Locked up!” said his Grace. “In choky, if you like it better!”

  Lady Caroline herself led the laugh. The situation was indeed worthy of her finely tempered steel, her consummate tact, her instinctive dexterity. Many a grander dame would have essayed to quell that incriminating tongue. Not so Lady Caroline Sellwood. She took her Australian wild bull very boldly by the horns.

  “I do believe,” she cried, “that you are what we have all of us been looking for — in real life — all our days. I do believe you are the shocking Duke of those dreadful melodramas in the flesh at last! What was your crime? Ah! I’ve no doubt you cannot tell us!”

  “Can I not?” cried the Duke, as Claude stopped him, unobserved, from pouring his tea into the saucer. “I’ll tell you all about it, and perhaps you’ll show me where the crime comes in, for I’m bothered if I see it yet. All I did was to have a gallop along one of your streets; I don’t even know which street it was; but there’s a round clearing at one end, then a curve, and then another clearing at the far end.”

  “Regent Street,” murmured Claude.

  “That’s the name. Well, it was quite early, there was hardly anybody about, so I thought surely to goodness there could be no harm in a gallop; and I had one from clearing to clearing. Blowed if they didn’t run me in for that! They kept me locked up all the morning. Then they took me before a fat old joker who did nothing much but wink. That old joker, though, he let me off, so I’ve nothing agen’ him. He’s a white man, he is. So here I am at last, having got your invitation to lunch, ma’am, just half-an-hour ago.”

  Sir Joseph Todd had been making fruitless efforts to rise, unaided, from his chair; he now caught Claude’s arm, and simultaneously, the eye of the Duke.

  “Jumping Moses!” roared Jack; “why, there he is! I beg your pardon, mister; but who’d have thought of finding you here?”

  “This is pleasing,” muttered Edmund Stubbs, in the background, to his friend the Impressionist. “I’ve seen the lion and the lamb lie down here together before to-day. But nothing like this!”

  The Impressionist whipped out a pencil and bared a shirt-cuff. No one saw him. All eyes were upon the Duke and the magistrate, who were shaking hands.

  “You have paid me a valuable compliment,” croaked Sir Joseph gayly. “Of course I winked! Hadn’t I my Lord Duke’s little peccadillo to wink at?”

  And he bowed himself away under cover of his joke, which also helped Lady Caroline enormously. The Duke mentioned the name by which he would go down to posterity on a metropolitan charge-sheet. Most people resumed their conversation. A few still laughed. And the less seriously the whole matter was taken, the better, of course, for all concerned, particularly the Duke. Olivia had him in hand now. And her mother found time to exchange a few words with Claude Lafont.

  “A dear fellow, is he not? So natural! Such an example in that way to us all! How many of us would carry ourselves as well in — in our bush garments?” speculated her Ladyship, for the benefit of more ears than Claude’s. Then her voice sank and trembled. “Take him away, Claude,” she gasped below her breath. “Take him away!”

  “I intend to,” he whispered, nodding, “when I get the chance.”

  “But not only from here — from town as well. Carry him off to the Towers! And when you get him there, for heaven’s sake keep him there, and take him in hand, and we will all come down in August to see what you have done.”

  “I’m quite agreeable, of course; but what if he isn’t?”

  “He will be. You can do what you like with him. I have discovered that already; he asked at once if you were here, and said how he liked you. Claude, you are so clever and so good! If any one can make him presentable, it is you!” She was wringing her white hands whiter yet.

  “I’ll do my best, for all our sakes. I must say I like my material.”

  “Oh, he’s a dear fellow!” cried Lady Caroline, dropping her hands and uplifting her voice once more. “So original — in nothing more than in his moral courage — his superiority to mere conventional appearances! That is a lesson — —”

  Lady Caroline stopped with a little scream. In common with others, she had heard the high, shrill mewing of a kitten; but cats were a special aversion of her Ladyship’s.

  “What was that?” she cried, tugging instinctively at her skirts.

  “Meow!” went the shrill small voice again; and all eyes fastened upon the Duke of St. Osmund’s, whose ready-made coat-tails were moving like a bag of ferrets.

&
nbsp; The Duke burst into a hearty laugh, and diving in his coat-tail pocket, produced the offending kitten in his great fist. Lady Caroline Sellwood took a step backward; and because she did not lead it, there was no laugh this time from her guests; and because there was no laugh but his own, the Duke looked consciously awkward for the first time. In fact, it was the worst moment yet; the next, however, Olivia’s pink palms were stretched out for the kitten, and Olivia’s laughing voice was making the sweetest music that ever had gladdened the heart of the Duke.

  “The little darling!” cried the girl with genuine delight. “Let me have it, do!”

  He gave it to her without a word, but with eyes that clung as fast to her face as the tiny claws did to her dress. Olivia’s attention was all for the kitten; she was serenely unconscious of that devouring gaze; but Claude saw it, and winced. And Lady Caroline saw it too.

  “Poor mite!” pursued Olivia, stroking the bunch of black fur with a cheek as soft. “What a shame to keep it smothered up in a stuffy pocket! Are you fond of cats?” she asked the Duke.

  “Am I not! They were my only mates up the bush. I brought over three besides the kitten.”

  “You brought them from the bush?”

  “I did so!”

  Olivia looked at him; his eyes had never left her; she dropped hers, and caressed the kitten.

  “I put that one in my pocket,” continued the Duke, “because I learned Livingstone to ride in front of me when he was just such another little ‘un. But he’d done a bolt in the night; I found him just now with his three working paws black with your London soot; but he wasn’t there when I got up, so I took the youngster. P’r’aps it wasn’t over kind. It won’t happen again. He’s yours!”

  “The kitten?”

  “Why, certainly.”

  “To keep?”

  “If you will. I’d be proud!”

  “Then I am proud. And I’ll try to be as kind to it as you would have been.”

  “You’re uncommon kind to me,” remarked the Duke irrelevantly. “So are you all,” he added, in a ringing voice, as he drew himself up to his last inch, and for once stood clear of the medium height. “I never knew that there were so many of you here, or I’d have kept away. I’m just as I stepped off of the ship. I went aboard pretty much as I left the bush; if you’ll make allowances for me this time, it sha’n’t happen again. You don’t catch me twice in a rig like this! Meanwhile, it’s very kind of you all not to laugh at a fellow. I’m much obliged to you. I am so. And I hope we shall know each other better before long!”

  Claude was not ashamed of him then. There was no truer dignity beneath the ruffles and periwigs of their ancestors in the Maske picture-gallery than that of the rude, blunt fellow who could face modestly and yet kindly a whole roomful of well-dressed Londoners. It did not desert him as he shook hands with Lady Caroline and Olivia. In another moment the Duke was gone, and of his own accord, before he had been twenty minutes in the house. And what remained of that Wednesday afternoon fell flat and stale — always excepting the little formula with which Lady Caroline Sellwood sped her parting guests.

  “Poor fellow,” it ran, “he has roughed it so dreadfully in that horrible bush! You won’t know him the next time you see him. Yes, I assure you, he went straight on board at that end and came straight to us at this! Not a day for anything in Melbourne or here. Actually not one day! I thought it so dear of him to come as he was. Didn’t you?”

  CHAPTER V

  WITH THE ELECT

  The ragged beard had been trimmed to a point; the uncouth hair had been cut, shampooed, and invested with a subtle, inoffensive aroma; and a twenty-five-shilling Lincoln and Bennett crowned all without palpable incongruity. The brown, chapped neck, on the other hand, did look browner and rougher than before in the cold clutch of a gleaming stand-up collar. And a like contrast was observable between the ample cuffs of a brand-new shirt, and the Duke’s hands, on whose hirsute backs the yellow freckles now stood out like half-sovereigns. Jack drew the line at gloves. On the whole, however, his docility had passed all praise; he even consented to burden himself with a most superfluous Inverness cape, all for the better concealment of the ready-made suit. In fine, a few hours had made quite a painfully new man of him; yet perhaps the only real loss was that of his good spirits; and these he had left, not in any of the shops to which Claude had taken him before dinner, but, since then, in his own house in Belgrave Square.

  Claude had shown him over it between nine and ten; they were now arm-in-arm on their way from this errand, and the street-lamps shone indifferently on the Duke’s dejection and on Claude’s relief. He had threatened instant occupation of his own town-house; he had conceived nightmare hospitalities towards all and sundry; and had stuck to his guns against argument with an obstinacy which made Claude’s hair stand on end. Now the Duke had less to say. He had seen his house. The empty, echoing, inhospitable rooms, with perhaps a handful of electric lights freezing out of the darkness as they entered, had struck a chill to his genial heart. And Claude knew it as he led the way to his own cosy chambers; but was reminded of another thing as he approached them, and became himself, on the spot, a different man.

  He had forgotten the two friends he had invited to come in for a private view of the large-paper edition. He was reminded of them by seeing from the street his open window filled with light; and his manner had entirely altered when he detained the Duke below, and sought with elaborate phrases to impress him beforehand with the transcendent merits of the couple whom he was about to meet. Jack promptly offered to go away. He had never heard tell of Impressionism, and artists were not in his line. What about the other joker? What did he do?

  “Nothing, my dear fellow; he’s far too good a man to do things,” explained Claude, whose changed speech inclined the other to flight quite as much as his accounts of the men upstairs. “The really delicate brains — the most highly sensitised souls — seldom spend themselves upon mere creative work. They look on, and possibly criticise — that is, when they meet with aught worthy their criticism. My friend, Edmund Stubbs, is such an one. He has a sensitised soul, if you like! His artistic standard is too high, he is too true to his ideals, to produce the imperfect. He is full of ideas; but they are too big for brush, pen, or chisel to express them. On the other hand, he’s a very fountain of inspiration, tempered by critical restraint, to many a man whose name (as my own) is possibly a household word in Clapham, where poor Edmund’s is unknown. Not that I should pity him on that score; he has a holy scorn for what himself would call a ‘suburban popularity’; and, indeed, I am not with him in his views as to the indignity of fame generally. But there, he is a bright particular star who is content to shine for the favoured few who have the privilege of calling him their friend.”

  “You do talk like a book, and no error!” said the Duke. “I haven’t ever heard you gas on like that before.”

  The bright particular star was discovered in Claude’s easiest chair, with the precious volume in one hand, and a tall glass, nearly empty, in the other; the Impressionist was in the act of replacing the stopper in the whisky-decanter; and Claude accepted the somewhat redundant explanation, that they were making themselves at home, with every sign of approval. Nor was he slow in introducing his friends; but for once the Duke was refreshingly subdued, if not shy; and for the first few minutes the others had their heads together over the large-paper edition, for whose “decorations” the draftsman himself had not the least to say, where all admired. At length Claude passed the open volume to his cousin; needless to say it was open at the frontispiece; but the first and only thing that Jack saw was the author’s name in red capitals on the title-page opposite.

  “Claude Lafont!” he read out. “Why, you don’t ever mean — to tell me — that’s you, old brusher?”

  Claude smiled and coloured.

  “You an author!” continued the Duke in a wide-eyed wonder. “And you never told me! Well, no wonder you can talk like a book when you can write one, to
o! So this is your latest, is it?”

  “The limited large-paper edition,” said Claude. “Only seventy-five copies printed, and I sign them all. How does it strike you — physically, I mean?”

  “‘Physically’ is quite pleasing,” murmured Stubbs; and Claude helped him to more whisky.

  Jack looked at the book. The back was of a pale brown cardboard; the type had a curious, olden air about it; the paper was thick, and its edges elaborately ragged. The Duke asked if it was a new book. It looked to him a hundred years old, he said, and discovered that he had paid a pretty compliment unawares.

  “There’s one thing, however,” he added: “we could chop leaves as well as that in the back-blocks!”

  The Impressionist grinned; his friend drank deep, with a corrugated brow; the poet expounded the beauties of the rough edge, and Jack gave him back his book.

  “I know nothing about it,” said he; “but still, I’m proud of you, I am so. And I’m proud,” he added, “to find myself in such company as yours, gentlemen; though I don’t mind telling you, if I’d known I’d be the only plain man in the room I’d never have come upstairs!”